FRITZ: The Story of a Political Assassination

by Ronald Florence ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 1971

On October 21, 1916, the Austrian Prime Minister, Count Sturgkh, was eating lunch in a posh Viennese restaurant when he was approached by a slight, donnish young man with a bushy blond mustache who unceremoniously drew a pistol and shot him dead. Scholarly and unemotional, a theoretical physicist who corresponded with Einstein, 'Fritz' was an unlikely assassin. A life-long champion of democracy and internationalism, he was the son (and until the war, the political mirror-image) of his father Victor Adler, leader of the Austrian Social Democrats and pillar of the Second International. No crazed aberrant act, the murder was a carefully thought out protest against Austria-Hungary's disastrous war policy and the bureaucratic tyranny of the most grotesque political configuration of the age. The author plays up the startling contemporary relevance of the sensational trial: ""I am guilty in the same degree as every officer who has killed in a war or who has given the order to kill -- no less and no more,"" Fritz told the court and the Austrian ruling class. As with Dreyfus and Calley, the trial of Fritz Adler became, mutatis mutandis, the trial of a nation. Florence makes the most of his material (Adler, who wanted above all to be heard, gave elaborate and detailed explications of his motives and his politics), weaving deftly the historic and psychological strands which led up to the murder and producing, incidentally, an absorbing history of the last, faltering days of the Empire which, more than Turkey, was the ""sick man of Europe."" Perry Mason for the defense, the author rescues Adler from historical oblivion and convincingly argues both his sanity and rationality as Austria's one-man resistance movement.

Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dial

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1971

Categories: NONFICTION